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Software Glitch Caused Crash of Airbus A400M Military Transport Aircraft
An anonymous reader writes: A software glitch caused the crash of an Airbus A400M military transport aircraft, claims German newspaper Der Spiegel (Google translation). The accident, which happened in Seville on the vehicle's first production test flight on 9 May, killed four crew members. Airbus is investigating the system controlling the aircraft's engines. The early suspicions are that it was an installation problem, rather than a design problem.
The accident, which happened in Seville on the vehicle's first production test flight on 9 May,
They WERE testing the plane. cant know about the bugs until the real world tests
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seriously.
If your shit can be installed wrong and lives depend on it being installed correctly, it's designed wrong.
Scott Adams' Falacy #24: IGNORING ALL ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
Example: I always get hives immediately after eating strawberries. But without a scientifically controlled experiment, it’s not reliable data. So I continue to eat strawberries every day, since I can’t tell if they cause hives.
Your assumptions are somewhat naive - +1 for the slashdot-populist-anger though.
Aircraft are not plug-and-play systems, like your home computer or tablet. They consist of miles of wiring and cabling, as well as hundreds of sensors, on board electronic computers and mechanical fail-safes from many different suppliers all over the world. For these reasons (as well as technological and environmental issues) not every single computer from every single company talks on the same hardware interface, or uses the same protocol. Sometimes, signals between devices are best suited to be analog, and sometimes it's digital. Sometimes the bus is serial, and sometimes it's Ethernet-based (e.g. AFDX).
Any modern airframer (like Airbus or Boeing) will have drawing and schematics on where a particular device is to be installed and how each pin of each device's connector (including power, inbound and output communication buses) should be wired to the rest of avionics. But, I would assume, that in this case someone made a mistake in the final assembly and someone else in quality assurance dropped the ball by not catching it.
Designing and integrating everything into a modern aircraft is one of the most complex tasks an engineer can experience. It's super complicated - But that does not mean that is "designed wrong".
Sometimes, people just make mistakes.